TEL AVIV – Vice President Joe Biden and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel have been in the news in recent days for envisioning the creation of a “new world order.”

The two politicians have a long history of using the phrase to advocate a global rebalancing through shared values, diplomacy and participation in international organizations.

Critics of the Obama administration say major global players – notably Russia and China – are not playing by international rules and may themselves be attempting to create an alternate rebalancing of national alliances at the expense of the West.

Hagel stated: “This is a time of great global transformation. We are seeing essentially a new world order evolving and being built. I don’t think we’ve seen such a time since right after World War II.

“And, again, the United States is an essential architect of this – of this process,” he added.

Last year, the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward quoted Hagel telling President Obama during a private meeting in 2009: “We are at a time where there is a new world order. We don’t control it. You must question everything, every assumption, everything they (the military and diplomats) tell you.”

Wrote Hagel: “No country today has the power to impose its will and values on other nations. As the new world order takes shape, America must lead by building coalitions of common interests, as we did after World War II.”

Hagel’s described new world order encompasses an American “foreign policy underpinned by engagement – in other words, active diplomacy but not appeasement.”

Regarding global engagement, Hagel said “the Obama administration, Congress and the Pentagon must get this right because it will frame the global architecture for the next generation.”

He called for global collaboration to build “seamless networks of intelligence gathering and sharing, and strengthening alliances, diplomatic cooperation, trade and development,” which he asserted “can make the biggest long-term difference and have the most lasting impact on building a more stable and secure world.”

Like Hagel’s conceptualization, Biden see’s the potential for global rebirth through international cooperation through bodies such as the United Nations.

In April 2013, Biden told the Export-Import Bank Annual Conference of international, institutional and global rules: “These institutions that the affirmative task we have now is – is to actually create a new world order.”

Not everyone is buying the rhetoric about a “new world order” of international diplomacy.

In his column last week, prominent pundit Charles Krauthammer mocked the Obama administration’s attempt to impose global norms on Russia and China.

“Chinese and Russians can only roll their eyes,” he wrote. “These norms and rules mean nothing to them. … Obama cites modern rules; Russia and China, animated by resurgent nationalism, are governed by ancient maps.”

Krauthammer warned the “alignment of the world’s two leading anti-Western powers” marks a “major alteration in the global balance of power.”

He said that if the Russian and Chinese global resurgence is “carried through, it would mark the end of a quarter-century of unipolarity.”

“And it would herald a return to a form of bipolarity – two global coalitions: one free, one not.”